Tag Archives: Dreamworks

The two biggest problems with Turbo, the latest animation from Dreamworks, both revolve around a word that is fatal to the success of a film: boring. The first is a surface problem, in that snails are boring. They are boring creatures, regardless of whether you pimp their shells or inject them with nitroglycerine. So a film in which the main character is a snail is onto a loser already. They are especially boring to look at, amorphous blobs of flesh with shells plonked on top that have to be jazzed up by the animators by making them all different colours. Only, the animators didn’t go that far in that each of the snails are just one colour, not dappled and slimy like the invertebrates in Epic. No, these are just smooth splodges of purple and orange with googly eyes tacked on. One of them has a moustache made of moss. This painful want of inventiveness becomes particularly problematic when the design of the humans is similarly uninspired, resulting in a film where not one single character holds your attention visually. In spite of using the latest animation technology, it’s an aesthetically dull film and far less interesting to the eye than A Bug’s Life or Antz, which work at a similar scale but were released well over a decade ago. This boringness suggests laziness, which is disheartening to see in animation.

Snails are exciting.

The second boring aspect of Turbo, a thoroughly soporific film, is the story, which involves a plucky outsider wanting to compete above his league in a racing tournament. This is the same plot as Planes. He does this in order to save a run down area of shops run by some stereotypes by bringing business back. This is the same plot as Cars. When you mix the plots of Planes and Cars, two of the most snooze-inducing animations of the 21st Century, the result is a dull, thudding familiarity lacking any conviction. There are a few good jokes, mostly involving crows, but at the end of the day it’s difficult to enjoy a film that is about a snail saving a taco stand. Once again I return to this one word that summarises the film best: boring. Boring, boring, boring.

Since Dreamworks animation was taken over by Fox, they announced a big and exciting slate that was a mixture of sequels to good films and interesting sounding new material. The quality of Rise of The Guardians and Madagascar 3, following in the footsteps of How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda 2 led some animation fans, this one included, to hope for Pixar levels of creativity and consistency. The Croods, the first film to be released under the new partnership, arrived with a certain level of expectation; could this be the start of a new era for Dreamworks? Well, if it is, it’s a slow, unremarkable one.

The Croods are one of the last surviving cavemen families, living in fear and believing that this fear keeps them alive. One day their cave is destroyed, and they have to explore the outside world to try and find another cave. Young, progressive Homo Sapiens Guy (Ryan Reynolds) manages to persuade the Neanderthals to move to higher ground, to avoid the impending tectonic shifts that will change the face of the world forever. Grug (Nicholas Cage) doesn’t trust Guy or, indeed, anything. His daughter Eep (Emma Stone), however, embraces the chance for adventure and spending time with Guy. What follows is yet another film about male insecurity, framed in a beautifully animated world with hybrid animals and colourful alien landscapes.

The problem, as several critics have already observed, is one of comparison. The prehistorically inaccurate setting is trying desperately not to be Ice Age, whilst the plot follows an arc ripped straight from How To Train Your Dragon. The driving relationship of the plot is, once more, a father and their child struggling to understand each other, and the final scene feels awfully familiar. There’s a sense that we’ve seen it all before, a feeling exacerbated by the uninspired voice work. A brick-subtle script that heavily signposts major themes makes it difficult to care about yet another family that have to learn to work together; Dragons and The Incredibles did the same thing a lot better. There’s no big emotional or transcendent moment here, it’s far more pedestrian than that.

The character animation is, quite frankly, awful. The blank eyes and textureless skin feel like a Saturday morning cartoon or a Playstation 2 game. Compare a character like Guy to Brave’s Merida, or even North from Rise of the Guardians, and The Croods is undeniably lacking. In a film from a studio this rich and talented, such ugliness in character design is incredibly disappointing, but also baffling.

And yet The Croods still manages to be a thoroughly entertaining adventure, packed with thankfully pop-culture-free laughs. Some of the jokes are undeniably naff – the irritating, kid-friendly sloth is the worst culprit here – but for every dud there are a couple of big hits. In abandoning any kind of realism, the film makers have clearly had a lot of fun in playing around with stereotypical ideas about cavemen, mining laughs from the invention of shoes, prehistoric photography and the dangers of tectonic plates. The family’s attempts at surviving and inventing things in a hostile world are consistently funny, and children will certainly find lots to enjoy.

The film’s biggest appeal, however, is the world it is set in. This is not earth as we know it, and The Croods features some of the best, most outrageous landscape and creature design that animation has to offer. Turtle birds, flying piranha and multicoloured, misshapen tigers are just some of the bizarre, brilliant animals that inhabit the jungles and deserts they explore. My personal favourite are Siamese lemurs, joined at the tail – what possible evolutionary advantage could that offer? The landscapes are equally fun, bright, colourful and totally rejecting realism to surprise the audience with each new terrain they cross. When the family split up to work their way through a maze of rocks in the film’s most beautiful sequence, The Croods shows its potential, frustrating us with a glimpse of what it could have been.

There’s lots to enjoy about to enjoy about The Croods, but it’s a shame that in a world this inventively created, the story couldn’t have been just a little bit bolder.

Who cares about the Oscars when the Annies are in town? It’s the awards ceremony that properly cares about animation, recognising the stellar efforts of production and character designers, of voice actors and editors. There’s such a wide range of categories that it makes the keen animation fan really consider the different facets of animated films. Whilst some elements seem a bit strange – they have different level ‘sponsors’, from platinum to bronze (unsurprisingly, Disney and Pixar pay top dollar here) – these awards are a must for for any of you who love this red carpet-filled time of year.

On January 30th the awards were held and the film that came out on top was Wreck-It Ralph, taking Best Feature, Director, Writing, Voice Actor for Alan Tudyk as King Candy and even the sublime Paperman, which plays before it, picked up best short. I personally preferred a couple of other animated films from last year, but Wreck-It Ralph is undeniably an impressive achievement. It just shows that this is a strong year for animated films. Elsewhere Rise of the Guardians and ParaNorman picked up many of the technical awards such as Storyboarding and Character Design, whilst the Dreamworks television spin off Dragons: Riders of Berk swept up the small screen awards. My biggest gripe is that this is very focussed on American animation – very little mention of Britain’s Pirates! or Japan’s From Up On Poppy Hill, both of which deserved more recognition.

As to what this augurs for the Oscars, where the five nominated films are Brave, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, Pirates! and Wreck-It Ralph, it’s difficult to say. The industry experts here appear to be endorsing Disney’s submission, but the Academy isn’t made up of as many animation buffs as this awards group is. Also, the sponsorship programme with Annies may make some difference, I’m not entirely aware of the processes there. Brave took the Golden Globe, so this is still an open race. They may even just award it to Frankenweenie just to encourage Tim Burton to stop making monstrosities like Dark Shadows.

Here are the full results:

Best Animated Feature

Brave – Pixar Animation Studios

Frankenweenie – The Walt Disney Studios

Hotel Transylvania – Sony Pictures Animation

ParaNorman – LAIKA/Focus Features

Rise of the Guardians – DreamWorks Animation

The Pirates! Band of Misfits – Aardman Animations and Sony Pictures Animation

The Rabbi’s Cat – GKIDS

Wreck-It Ralph – Walt Disney Animation Studios

Best Animated Special Production

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 – Warner Bros. Animation

Beforel Orel – Trust – Starburns Industries, Inc.

Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem – Illumination Entertainment

Disney Tron: Uprising – Beck’s Beginning – Disney TV Animation

Dragons: Gift of the Night Fury – DreamWorks Animation

Justice League: Doom – Warner Bros. Animation

Best Animated Short Subject

Brad and Gary – Illumination Entertainment

Bydlo – The National Film Board of Canada

Eyes on the Stars – StoryCorps

Goodnight Mr. Foot – Sony Pictures Animation

Kali the Little Vampire – Folimage Studios, Ciclope Filmes, The National Film Board of Canada and Studio GDS

Last week Dreamworks Animation announced their upcoming slate and to call it busy is something of an understatement. They’ve been increasingly prolific with their output in recent years, but they have kicked it up a notch as they plan to release twelve films in four years, mostly originals with a couple of sequels and spin offs. It’s part of a new distribution deal with Fox, and whilst cynics may dismiss this as a cash grab, the variety of titles and ideas suggests that Dreamworks’ recent creative surge looks set to continue.

The Chief Creative Officer for Dreamworks, Bill Damaschke, describes the announcement as “the result of the amazing work and devotion from DreamWorks Animation’s vast roster of directors, producers and artistic talent over many years.” The cast and crews they have assembled for these projects certainly look as promising as Damaschke’s enthusiasm suggests. The Croods is directed by one half of the Dragons directing team Chris Sanders, and stars Nic Cage, RyanReynolds and Emma Stone. Reynolds is also set to appear in Turbo, alongside Paul Giamatti and Richard Jenkins as well as many others (the newly named Snoop Lion will make an appearance). They’ll be voicing a script co-written by Robert Siegel, who wrote The Wrestler. Elsewhere, they’ve drafted in Lion King director Rob Minkoff, and voice talent as varied as Stephen Colbert and Alison Janney. These do not look like the efforts of a half-hearted studio merely wanting to rake in the cash. Snoop Lion (and perhaps Ryan Reynolds) aside, these are quality names assembled just for the first two of their long list of upcoming films. Having the names of Giamatti, Jenkins and Siegel behind your film are enough to make critics round the world uncomfortably excited.

It’s not just the talent behind them that ramp up anticipation for these films, but the ideas, too. Admittedly, there are the usual themes coming through of ‘discovering the meaning of friendship’, and more than one ‘odd couple’ scenario, but both Pixar and Dreamworks have been doing these for years and often with great success. Not only that, but there appears to be a freshness to some of the ideas that means they will hopefully rise above more standard blockbuster animations.

Most intriguing is the distant prospect of Mumbai Musical, which the Dreamworks site describes as “the studio’s first ever Bollywood-style animated musical adventure inspired by the great Indian epic tale of the Ramayana but told from the point of view of the monkeys.” It’s a premise so out-there for a mainstream animation studio, I’ll be surprised if it does actually get made.

But there’s more of interest. Me and My Shadow will combine traditional and CG animation (already something to get excited by) to tell the story of a shadow who is more adventurous than the timid boy he is attached to. There’ll undoubtedly be a standard resolution of boy and shadow working together and becoming true friends, but it sounds promising at least. The Croods will be about cavemen, and Turbo will be about a snail who dreams of racing in the Indy 500 (sounds like a premise Pixar would have once come up with). Not only that but their sequels are also part of their two best franchises, How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda. Both have displayed the studio’s capacity for stunning animation and, in Dragons in particular, telling stories with real heart. Whether The Penguins of Madagascar is entirely necessary, however, remains to be seen.

Right at the beginning of the studio, Dreamworks made a bold choice with The Prince of Egypt; for a fledgling outfit to release a children’s film about a vengeful God who, at one point, kills lots of children, was an incredibly daring move. Their second traditionally animated film covered Spanish colonialism in central America, also not an especially easy topic. This innovation seriously petered off after a while, lost in a mass of talking animals with annoying smirks, and for a long time their films made very little impact. But recently the studio has undergone something of a renaissance, as Dragons, Pandas 1 & 2 and even Madagascar 3 have received critical plaudits, and they have returned to making story and character driven films that look amazing.

With the upcoming Rise of the Guardians, which looks set to be their best yet, it is perhaps time to reassess the position of Dreamworks on the rostrum of great animation studios. They may not be the most consistent, and their tendency towards cheap pop-culture gags so frequently lets them down, but they are definitely able to make top tier animated films, and with this latest batch of films on the horizon, it seems as though things are only going to improve.